


The fingers that gave you your scars now try to shake your hand.

by Lwoorl



Series: History of the broken people. [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: OCs - Freeform, Original Character-centric, Post-War, Yeerks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 17:06:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8541538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lwoorl/pseuds/Lwoorl
Summary: After the end of the war, a yeerk and an ex-host sit down and talk.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Los dedos que te dieron tus cicatrices ahora intentan estrechar tu mano.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8453260) by [Lwoorl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lwoorl/pseuds/Lwoorl). 



> I don’t really have that much confidence about writing in English but Whippytwirl, my English beta reader, helped me to fix this fic's grammar and typos, so it should be fine. However, if you find any mistake please tell me and I will fix it!

“Maybe this is a bad idea” Essnar muttered as soon as she got in front of the door, the same way she had muttered to herself every couple of hours for the past three days. She already had spent a week in the city but she still couldn’t get the guts to do something as simple as ring the bell, and the vacation the company gave her finished next Friday.

Certainly, this was the farthest she had got, from looking at the house from the other side of the street, to looking at it from a couple of meters from the door, to being in front of the door itself, finally she had reached this point after several days trying to gather the courage, and she knew better than anyone how hard had been to get this far, but there was no way she could feel pleased with herself for such a tiny accomplishment as getting near a door, and she surely wouldn’t go back home without finishing what she came there to do after having come so close. She had to be brave.

“This is such a horrible idea” she said while she pressed the button.

A twenty-six-year-old man that Essnar immediately recognized opened the door.

He had gotten taller, like 10 centimeters taller than what she remembered, and had dyed his hair brown and changed his hairstyle, but it was impossible to not recognize the freckled boy with gray eyes that she met for the first time so many years ago. Seeing how he had grown she felt something like pride and immediately felt guilty for that.

“What do you need?” Ivan asked, and the knot inside Essnar’s stomach went up to her throat. {{Say that you got the wrong house}} she thought {{say that you came to notify that the community board will have a meeting next Friday}}. Instead, she took the little card that accredited her as an official citizen, the one that said in big letters “Essnar 075 of the Luhar pool” and “nothlit”, and with surprisingly steady fingers gave it to the boy, hoping he wouldn’t close the door on her face and at the same time hoping he would.

Ivan’s face didn’t show any big changes while he examined her ID, but as he took off his gaze from the plasticized card she noticed he was terribly pale and vaguely thought about that documentary where it was mentioned that the involuntary ones used to forget how to make facial expressions by themselves. The knot in her windpipe tightened and she could have sworn she felt her intestines rearrange themselves. 

“What… are you doing here?” Ivan said slowly, but with a firm voice in which surprisingly she didn’t notice anger.

“I..” she started, looking at the floor, she was so sure that as soon he discovered who she was he would close the door that now she didn’t know how to say the sentence she had traveled there from the other side of the country for. She took a mouthful of air, straightened her shoulders and looked up: This was a sentence that only could be said while looking straight at him, she would never forgive herself if she didn’t look him at the eyes in that moment.

“I’m here to apologize” She said, at last, feeling significantly less relief than what she was expecting “I’m sorry I took four years of your life, I’m sorry I enslaved you, I’m sorry I took your freedom and privacy, I’m sorry the way I treated you… I’m sorry about everything I did to you”

{{That came a lot less poetic than expected and a lot lamer, but at least now that it’s done it doesn’t matter if he closes the door}} she thought. 

Ivan raised an eyebrow and looked at her for a while without saying a thing, puzzled, Essnar was ready for any kind of reaction from him, she was expecting him to tell her she hadn’t the right to apologize, to scream on her face how much he hated her, how terrible her species was, she was ready to be called slug or demon or be punched in the face; That would had been normal from Ivan, oh, impulsive Ivan, that kid who joined the Sharing wanting to deal with his insecurities, that boy who since the moment a parasite took control over his head turned from a shy kid to the worst host a yeerk could imagine, that kid who always refused to give up, who never stopped kicking and screaming every time Essnar left him to feed, Ivan, the same Ivan that never stopped yelling insults inside his head, that didn’t stop fighting for his freedom, not even for a second, that in so many years never broke entirely, never stopped struggling. Yes, Essnar would have expected anything coming from that child who used to conspire inside the cages, that Ivan who every three days tried to escape and two times almost got killed while trying, everything… except him opening the door of his house and, with the same voice that just some years ago he constantly used to spit threats, say the sentence “Don’t you want to come in?... Let’s talk for a moment”

“…Ok” that was her answer, with a voice so little that if he wouldn’t have made a vague gesture to indicate her to enter she would have thought he didn’t hear. What else could she say? There was no way to refuse the offer, it was just impossible, the same Ivan who always focused into making her trip down stairs, that once almost made her bury a fork inside her eye socket while she was trying to eat some pasta, the Ivan that Essnar didn’t want to accept she had come to miss now opened his house’s door and invited the demon who possessed him for four whole years to chat for a while. There was no way to refuse, but this was out of everything she could had imagined. 

She knew better than anyone how much her ex-host had to hate her… And still… Now *THAT* Ivan opened the door and invited her to chitchat. 

Her stomach squeezed a little at the thought that, really… Could it be that she was going to be forgiven? {{No, no, that is not possible, no way}} she thought, {{it’s Ivan who we’re talking about, it’s impossible… And still}}, for a second she thought that maybe Ivan was toying with her, the same way she used to give him fake hope just to take it away, the same way she sometimes would give him some control in the morning and remain silent, just enough to make him consider the possibility that it all had been just a dream and then used to tear the control from him once again. It didn’t matter how old that “prank” got, Ivan always fell in the trick. Every. Single. Time.  
{{It’s not his style… but it might be it}}

And still… A little hope was still there, and she dared to imagine how it would be if they both exchanges email address and sent each other an email every four months, or maybe meet once every year to talk about anything except war… That image turned out to be more comfortable than what she expected, and something inside her chest squeezed again. 

“Come in” Ivan said, seeing that Essnar hadn’t moved, and as she realized she had spaced out the yeerk felt her face get hot. “Sure” she said, louder than her first answer and hurried to go inside the house.

She took some steps inside, he closed the door at her back, and they both stayed standing near the green welcome mat with a white “Welcome!” printed on it. Essnar didn’t know what to do… Was she allowed to sit down on the sofa? she sure as hell didn’t feel able to touch anything without first being assured she was allowed to, so, she just glanced around, and judging by the way Ivan rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture she remembered he used to do to show frustration, he probably didn’t know where or how or when they should “talk”. {{Probably he invited me inside without thinking it through}} it occurred to Essnar {{…He has kept the impulsiveness he developed throughout our time together}}

Finally, Ivan released some kind of annoyed growl that made Essnar flinch, probably just in order to break the awkward silence (Ivan hated the silence, the same he hated to be alone and the same he hated not being able to make friends, these were the things that led him to the Sharing after all) and pointing at an open door, before which a freezer could be seen, surely the kitchen, he said 

“Do you want to drink something? Do you still like tea?” 

“Yes, I still like tea”

“Well, fantastic, let’s drink tea”

Essnar followed Ivan into the kitchen, always walking behind him, and didn’t sit down until he indicated a chair. They didn’t talk while he made the tea except for a quick exchange of “What kind of tea do you want? I have green, black, white, chai, and, umm, what I think is souchong” “whichever is fine” “Your favorite was chai, wasn’t it? Do you still like it?” “Yes, I still like it” “Then it will be chai for we both”

Essnar took some time to examine that place with more interest, from the kitchen she could see the living room and part of what she only could suppose was some kind of mini library: a bookshelf and a chair in which two people could sit down. As far as she could see, there didn’t seem to be a dining room, so he probably just ate on the tiny table in the kitchen that she was beside of. The house was little, but the furniture was arranged in a way that it didn’t feel claustrophobic and in general almost everything was clean (there were some stains in the kitchen though), there wasn’t too much decoration, except for a handful of paintings, among which she noticed an image of a vase with yellow geraniums that she also had hung on her house.

After looking around for a while and not noticing anything interesting, except maybe for a copy of “The Castle” by Kafka, lying on the worktop, she decided to focus her attention on Ivan while he made the tea. He was a living imitation of the way she used to make it while inside his head, letting the temperature go way too high and adding way too much cinnamon. He placed the tea in front of her and without say a word sited at the other side of the table, right in front of her.

“So you actually liked tea after all, even though you always complained about how much you hated it” Essnar said with a happy voice without thinking, only to immediately feel how her face got red, if Ivan heard this comment, he didn’t acknowledge it.

Essnar played with the mug for a while, it was a big mug, almost totally white except for the drawing of a mustache on the front that made her smile a little, and after giving it enough time to cool down she started to drink it, slowly. Certainly, the tea was almost the same she made, except that some years after she got her permanent body she had started to add it milk.

After a couple of sips, she looked at Ivan. They both were, physically, really different. She had decided to build her body from DNA of two Chinese girls, a woman with Korean heritage, a young boy from Taiwan, and a grandpa with green eyes whose origins she didn’t know; The objective was to create a body with Asian features but the old man’s eyes, and somehow in the process of mixing five people she managed to give herself heterochromia. He now had brown hair, but originally it was black, was pretty tall, with a face totally covered in freckles and moles, and big gray eyes that, in Essnar’s opinion, fit perfectly the shy boy who joined a cult in order to make friends but clashed with the temperamental personality that he developed while his slavery. 

Yes, both of them were very different, but, even now their gestures were amazingly alike. He gave her the tic of playing with the collar of her shirt, she knew she was responsible for him biting the edge of the glass every time he drank something hot, there was no way to know who originated the bad habit of biting their nails, he blamed her for starting it in the middle of a specially stressing investigation, she blamed him for starting it one day in the cages, and it had been a constant discussion topic that they kept the entirely of their last year together. 

Essnar looked around again, that house had a little of her… The way the furniture was organized, the excess of pillows on the living room’s couch, the way almost everything was spotless… And in her house, there was also a little bit of him too, even so subtle, but it was there, she had geography encyclopedias, the ones that Ivan liked to read so much, and she also owned a lot of shirts and accessories with stupid sentences that fit exactly with his sense of humor, she even got a dog, even after how some years ago she insisted so much on her hate for pets, she had a dog and there was no doubt it was because Ivan’s love for animals had stuck to her at some point.

Gazing at the half-empty mug she couldn’t avoid thinking that not everything was so bad, who but she was the one who taught him how to eat healthy? Who but Essnar was the one who stopped the habit of cigarettes that he had started to pick? Who but she, the one that showed him how to keep his room clean? He was an insufferable host and she released her stress on him, yes, that was true, but there had been some good moments, even so little, that day in which motivated by boredom they both played chess and she tried to resist the natural instinct of reading his mind, that time the girl who sat besides them accused them of cheating in a test and they spent the rest of the afternoon insulting her inside their head, working together in order to create imaginative insults, or that many times she had let him pay attention to the classes he liked and space out in the ones he didn’t, surely she hadn’t been the worst possible yeerk that Ivan could had got, not everything she remembered was bad moments, not everything could be bad moments, they argued and insulted each other and stood against the other every time they could, but, weren’t there some little moments in which they agreed in some things or even got to work together, even if just for a little while?  
{{You are going back to the old habits}} she said to herself {{Stop with the excuses, you basically just described the Stockholm syndrome}} 

“So what have you been doing lately?” Ivan said, cutting off the thoughts of the yeerk, with a voice with so much obviously fake joy, and so much authentic awkwardness “Are you living around here? what are you working as?”

{{Well, if he wants to talk about trivial stuff instead of the past}} she thought {{then it’s perfectly fine with me. If he wants I’m happy to talk about the weather}}

“No, I’m living in another city… these last years I have been changing jobs a lot and have moved almost constantly, so, even though right now I have a house to my name probably I will move again soon, I’m also working at a little company but I will probably quit as soon as I move out… And how are you doing?”

“Fine, I’m working as a lawyer, I’m pretty new though, so, honestly it seems more like if I were an assistant than anything else”

“I thought you wanted to be an historian…”

“Stuff happened, and you? I thought the yeerks who worked as scientists for the empire had it more or less easy to get a stable work and place to live”

“Well, stuff happened”

“Yeah, I guess a lot of stuff happened…”

“Yes, that… Seems to be a thing we agree on, doesn’t it?”

The silence lasted almost ten seconds before Ivan broke it. He let the mug beside him and, interlacing his fingers over the table, talked in the most slowly and monotonous possible way “Listen… I tried, you came here apologizing and I really tried to accept your apology… For a while I have been trying to forget everything that happened, and for a second I thought that, finally, with you here, asking forgiveness, if we talked for a while about some simple stuff as if everything were alright… I don’t know, that I could let it go or something… But I can’t forgive you, a part of me even can sympathize with you, but the part that is still hateful is bigger than the one who wants to let the past behind” 

“It’s fine” Essnar answered, after taking a sip of tea, her hopes that she would be forgiven had just definitely died and, somehow, even though some part of her was disappointed, even melancholic, listening to Ivan’s words the knot in her stomach disappeared at last, somehow, knowing she wouldn’t be forgiven, knowing that it was it, even if it left a bitter taste on her tongue, it gave her the rest she wanted to find before, when she said her apologies at the door. She sighed and continued “Really, it’s fine, to be honest I didn’t came here thinking I would really be forgiven, I really was expecting you to close the door on my face as soon you knew who I was…”

Ivan raised an eyebrow “Why did you came here to apologize if you weren’t expecting to be forgiven?”

“For a long time…” Essnar paused for a moment, trying to organize the words in her head before saying them “For a long time… I convinced myself that I did nothing wrong, I repeated any kind of excuses, even after getting used to the idea that slavery is unfair I, you won’t believe this, but I decided that I was a benevolent yeerk, do you remember how I always used to say ‘you’re lucky I’m the one in your head, any other yeerk would torture ten times worse’? I kept repeating again and again that it wasn’t my responsibility, that it was the way I was indoctrinated to, that for being someone indoctrinated on this way of thinking I actually had been a good person… Honestly, even now, I can’t stop thinking sometimes that what I did wasn’t that bad, even when my rational part understands that what I did affected you terribly… Even so, I still keep telling myself stuff like ‘I had an important role in making him grow healthy’ or ‘if it wasn’t for me he would have filled his lungs with nicotine’ or even ‘it wasn’t that bad’… But of course I don’t remember it as such a bad experience, I wasn’t the one who was enslaved … I did something wrong, I understand it, that’s why I thought that at least I should let you know that now I know this fact, it’s that simple as that…”

Essnar took a deep breath, as if she had said all that without stopping to breathe. That wasn’t all what she wanted to say, it wasn’t just that she realized how her actions affected him, no, also Ivan was the person she had been the closest to, they both stayed permanently together for four years, they both had taken a big part of the other… Without any doubt Ivan had become part of her, an important part that would stay with her forever… They both had hated each other, honestly wished the other’s death… And still, she couldn’t help the fact that she felt some kind of special connection with that boy, that human whom she knew all his secrets, that boy she understood better than anyone else…  
It was hard to know how to name these feelings and after torturing him for four years she decided that it would be sick to use such words as love or care… But, with name or without it, these emotions stayed there. She wanted to see him again, she wasn’t sure what she actually wanted to accomplish with that, she just knew that she had wanted to see him one more time.

Ivan seemed to consider her words for a moment, took the mug to his mouth twice even though it was already empty, keeping a look in his eyes that reminded Essnar of the shy Ivan he probably would had been all his life if it wasn’t for the intervention of a fucking alien invasion. He looked up and their eyes met. Both looked tired of everything, both had the expression that everyone who was affected by the war had. Ivan took the mug to his teeth one more time before finally leaving it quiet on the center of the table and opening his mouth to talk.

“If you had come two years earlier, no, maybe just one year early, I would had closed the door on your face” Essnar looked down, but Ivan kept watching her face, indifferent about if she was or wasn’t reciprocating his gaze “But… well” He stopped and scratched the back of his neck, as if he considered what to say, and continued “…I stayed angry for a long time… I really hated your species, probably I will always keep hating it, but, see… The war is over. And there’s nothing I can do to change the final result, keeping the belief that you all should die even now that there’s no fight with the empire, now that we aren’t been invaded… It wouldn’t help me to move on… I want to accept what happened, it might be selfish, but honestly it’s not because it’s morally right, I just want to help myself to keep walking forward, I don’t want to live my life hating the thing that the present has become, these years were an important part of my life, and will always be part of my history… You will always be part of my history, no matter if I like it or not, but it’s over, this is the present and that’s it, there’s no point in keep been resentful about the way the world is”

“I… Still don’t know if it's fair to blame someone for acting the way they were raised to” Essnar started to say little time after Ivan finished, finally looking up “But, I think that if someone has done something they regret the best thing they can do is try to fix it or at least apologize… The past is part of us and maybe for some people just ignoring it works for them, but not for me. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing to live in the past, but to hide it under the carpet doesn’t look healthy to me either, it’s what made us what we’re now, after all… This might be unconvincing coming for the victimizer but…” For the first time in the day, Essnar felt that she could relax her back, they looked the other directly at the eyes, but this time there wasn’t animosity or nervous or awkwardness, and Essnar felt how her lips twisted into a honest smile at the same time she said “Somehow I’m glad you don’t forgive me, there’s nothing wrong with accepting that the past sucked Ivan, there’s nothing wrong with never letting it go, as long as you can accept living in the present then it doesn’t matter if you let the past go or keep it with you… Thank you, now that I talked with you I feel I can finish this chapter of my life, my experience with you was important for who I am and I won’t forget it, but I think that now it will be easier for me to accept that it was something that already happened and already ended”

Ivan seemed to balance the weight of her words for a moment, and, after a while, extended a hand, Essnar brought her own closer with some indecision but at the end shaked his hand effusively.

“I also thank you for coming here” Said Ivan before finishing the handshake “You were also an important part of my life, independent of if it was a good or a bad experience, I think we won’t see each other again but I’m sure we both will always keep been a part of the other, want it or not. I feel better knowing that I could give this some kind of closure”

When the handshake ended both had some tears starting to form in the corner of their eyes, sadness? Joy? No, it was more some kind of melancholy or even nostalgia, surely it was something that Essnar would have to deal with forever, but, even if the taste of an end was a bittersweet one, the sensation of farewell wasn’t totally unpleasant. 

“Yeah, surely I won’t see you again… Good luck”

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to change some stuff from the Spanish version, this is because I believe that every text carries not only a meaning but also a feeling, and sometimes this feeling gets lost in translation. There are a lot of expressions that sound great in English but kinda lame in Spanish and vice versa, if I translated someone else's work I would do it verbatim but since this story is mine I can allow myself to prioritize the overall feeling over an exact translation.... I know I make it sound as if this were a totally different story but actually if you read both versions you probably won’t notice any changes unless you try to spot the differences.


End file.
